I know it's been talked about a lot, but seriously – what is going on with the obsession with filling the inside of every car with more screens than the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange? It’s like every car needs to have a screen in the middle of the dashboard the size of a cinema screen and another screen where the cluster should be, and in some cars a screen for a rearview mirror and even screens in the doors, displaying the image from cameras where the side view mirrors should be. I’m torn when it comes to these cameras, because they do make sense in some places but at the same time are utterly ridiculous. You see, to me they make total sense on HGVs, removing two massive mirrors from the side of the truck reducing drag and giving multiple views of blind spots etc. right there next to the driver. But at the same time they’re ridiculous; a camera and a screen will never be as good as a mirrored surface. A mirror can’t suddenly fail, well, unless you misjudge a gap anyway. What's more is that at night, an LCD or OLED or plasma or whatever other screen technology they use will be as good at night.
It's the same with replacing the rearview mirror with a screen; it just doesn't make sense in my eyes. Replacing a piece of mirrored glass with an LCD and a camera that will get covered in salt and dirt from the roads and a screen that's always lit up in the corner of your eye. And what if it packs up? You’re sitting there at the lights watching the person behind you dancing along to Year 3000 by Busted, and all of a sudden it goes black, followed by the message “No signal”. I’d like to see a mirror do that. Now don’t get me wrong, reversing cameras are handy, but I’d be annoyed if they were on constantly.
But this all brings me onto the point of tech for the sake of tech in a car. Now I love tech. I love playing with the newest gadget or gizmo, and because I’m a mega nerd, I also love tinkering with electronics and components.
I also love buttons. Physical clicky buttons, whether they’re on a mechanical keyboard or the dashboard of a car, a clicky button means that even when I’ve got my eyes on the road, I know I’ve pressed a button from the reassuring click and the feeling of the button being pressed in. It’s a response, meaning I can keep an eye on the road, avoiding the countless potholes, whilst turning on the demister without looking down at the dahsboard. But now with more cars taking all of those controls and hiding them in menus on a tablet that's replaced all the clicky buttons. You have to go into submenus to turn things on and off, control heat and light, and even, in one case, open the flipping glove box! I can imagine how one day a couple will be thundering down the motorway when suddenly they need something from the glove box, where after tappy tapping through countless menus and two updates, they’re told they can’t open the glove box without a subscription. You can get into massive amounts of trouble for tapping away on your phone whilst driving along, but looking down at a giant screen seventy inch screen to find the seat heater whilst driving along is fine. There’s no feedback either - whilst I imagine you get a gentle beep when you tap the screen, you don’t get the same reassurance as pressing a physical button.
Now at this point I imagine you’re mad at me for talking badly of tech leeching its way into vehicles, but before you take my thunder and send an angry email into my inbox, know that as I said, I love tech, and there are things I do love tech-wise in cars. Safety systems on cars are getting more and more intelligent, to the point that cars will now know if you’ve drifted off or passed out and safely stop and park up and even call the emergency services. There are cars that can anticipate impacts before they’ve even happened and so many more leaps and bounds that, whilst in some cases they might take control away from the driver, do in fact make cars a lot safer. That's where tech development should be going.
So where do we go from here? Well, I think car manufacturers should dial back the screens and go back to physical buttons where it matters, keep mirrors analogue, and concentrate on using modern tech to make the cars safer, which includes not having screens everywhere.